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COMPLEMENTARITY OF SOURCES INSTUDYING ADAPTATION: AN ORAL HISTORYVIEWPOINT

Tiiu Jaago & Ene Kõresaar

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to elucidate the complementary natureof two types of sources: First, an autobiographical narrative about the Sovietperiod written in 2005, 14 years after the period described. Second, a court filecreated by the representatives of Soviet authority from their point of view andcontaining material from the period 1945–1994. Both documents representvery different genres, are temporally different, have different purposes, anddifferent viewpoints. Inspired by the work of Alessandro Portelli, particularlyby his model of multilayered history-telling, the method of separating texts inthree layers, institutional, communal, and personal, is used. The central ques-tion about the possibility of complementary treatment of diverse sources in oralhistory is posed against the background of researching adaptation to the Sovietregime. Asking a direct question will not offer the researcher very much infor-mation about actual adaptation or inadaptability because the respondents willbe affected by their attitude towards, and the act of remembering, the Sovietregime. Therefore, in the present study the language of written texts is chosenfor analysis pointing out that two contrary concepts characterise adaptation toSoviet authority: opposition that disputes the authority’s point of view, and theinability to phrase phenomena in the ‘non-Soviet language’. Additionally, theproblem of individual agency in encountering the repressive ideological andsocietal system as expressed in the sources both diachronically and synchro-nically is discussed.

Key words: adaptation, life history, oral history, post-Soviet studies, sourcecriticism

INTRODUCTION

This article is a reflection on a process of studying Estonians’ adaptation to theSoviet regime from the perspective of oral history in the way it offers a meth-odologically new treatment of different types of sources. The focus of the arti-cle is twofold: firstly, it aims at elucidating the possibility of complementaryanalysis of a contemporary autobiographical narrative and a historical courtfile in order to, secondly, draw conclusions about the adaptation processes inEstonia since 1945 from the perspective of an individual.

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The idea for the present article arose from a report given in November2007 at a conference of oral history in Cracow.1 We spoke of a dialogue in theoral history sources where the linguistic performance originates from differ-ent images or “pictures” of history. We were interested in the way that peopleadapted to the “Soviet way of thinking”. This theme does not automaticallypresent itself to the researcher. If we ask a direct question of how an individualadapted to the Soviet regime, the answer will be affected by the individual’sattitude towards the regime as well as to the actual discourses of remember-ing. For this reason, we studied the same process ‘indirectly’, using the lin-guistic level.2 For our sources we have used two written texts of a very differ-ent kind: an autobiographical narrative sent in to a public competition at theEstonian Literary Museum in 2005, and a court file, assembled by the Sovietorgans and held at the State Archives, containing documents from the periodof 1945–1994. Our purpose was to study how people’s adaptation to a ‘language’alien to them is expressed. The first document, the autobiographical narrativeenabled us to consider adaptation synchronically by observing different stylesthat make up the narrator’s text and the narrator’s presentation of the roles ofthose who “speak” in these styles. The other document, however, made it pos-sible to follow the problem diachronically and, at the same time, in a situationwhere the parties of the dialogue (and their language usage) are in conflict.3

We found the theoretical framework for our research from the works of YuriLotman in which the exchange of information (language, culture) in bordersituations, as in the encounter of different cultures (languages) is described(Lotman 1994; 1999, especially pp. 14–15). This enabled us to view such con-flicting situations within the context of Soviet power and Estonian culture.

From the feedback to our research presented at the Cracow conference wecame to an understanding that a court file as a source is not necessarily recog-nizable from the point of view of oral history. Both sources inspired us to studyadaptation resulting from the conflict; the difference in the genre of the sources,however, was perceived by our audience as non-compatible for the purposes oforal history. The different notions of oral history underlying this misunder-standing seems evident: ‘oral history’ in English means mainly an oral narra-tive of the past, the basic source of which is an interview (Portelli 1997a, Grele2007); the similar, implicitly formed research in the humanitarian and socialsciences, focusing on popular understanding of history are not called ‘oral his-tory’ in other languages (cf. Thompson 2000 [1978]; Burke 2004; Fingerroos etal. 2006). Estonian ‘oral history’ tradition belongs to the second category, as-suming the use of different sources, including written and archival ones (Jaago2001; Jaago et al. 2002; Jaago et al. 2006). We thus needed to find a way todescribe these sources to the researchers of oral history in a way that they


Complementarity of Sources in Studying Adaptation: An Oral History Viewpoint

would understand. At the same time, we had to make these texts which, notonly by their structure but also their time and purpose of creation are totallydifferent, comparable in presenting the results of our research.

A solution seemed to be ‘translating’ the sources of a seemingly non-oralhistorical nature into the language of oral history. For this purpose, we reliedon Alessandro Portelli’s classic narrative modes of history-telling. Here speak-ing about history is distributed analytically between three layers: institutional,communal, and personal.4 In the following article we have based our descrip-tion of sources on Portelli’s model,5 while at the same time keeping the basicquestion of adaptation. Our purpose is to unfold atypical sources from the per-spective of oral history and analyse them within the classic theoretical frameof oral history. Bringing together Lotman’s theory which makes it possible todescribe the encounter of different ‘languages’ in a conflict situation, andPortelli’s approach where history-telling is divided between the institutional,communal, and personal layer, the complex relations of all these layers in aconflict situation are brought forth and can then be studied by applying thenotion of adaptation.

ORAL HISTORY AS MULTIVOCAL DISCOURSE: A MODEL FOR

COMPLEMENTARY TREATMENT OF SOURCES

Portelli’s tripartite mode of history-telling is based on an understanding that itwill not be sufficient in studying oral history if we only frame the individualnarratives with the dynamics of history. Portelli treats a personal oral narra-tive as a structurally complex text where changes in language usage and defi-nition of time also denote changes in experience (which in its turn is alsostructural). The characters, space of action and grammar of a story alternateaccording to the point of view the story is told from. Thus Portelli differenti-ates between institutional, communal, and personal layers which manifestthemselves as certain tendencies and are never quite separable. Conversely,the meaning of history in these narratives exhibits itself in a combination ofthese layers. The story in the institutional mode is told impersonally in thethird person and considers what happens at the state or national level (in theideology and political activities of the government, the parties and/or the tradeunions). The story in the communal mode involves the immediate environ-ment, the community (town, neighbours) and working life where the narrativemainly uses the communal ‘we’. The story’s focus in the personal mode is thehome (private and family life) and the events of personal life (such as instances



of death, birth, jobs, children, etc.) but also personal attitudes towards the firsttwo layers with the narrative using the first person singular (Portelli 1997b:27). Our method treats the official (Soviet) state viewpoint in an Estonian con-text as the institutional layer; the locality (village, commune) and the generalethnic Estonian community as the communal layer and private and family lifeas the personal layer.

The pre-requisite of applying the whole model is language, as concludedfrom Portelli’s understanding of genre:

If we define genre as a verbal construct shaped by shared verbal devices –whether conventionally established or not – oral history is then both agenre of narrative and historical discourse, and a cluster of genres, someshared with other types of discourse, some peculiar to itself (Portelli 1997a:3–4).

Language is fundamental in pointing out the narrative point of view, be itinstitutional (“they would go”, “they”, “you”), communal (“we”), or personal(“I”). Our method also concentrates on language where we first delineate thepoint of view of the first-hand narrator and narrative (“they”, “we”, “I”). In oursources, however, the conflict of naming the phenomena and situations is inthe foreground and causes a concentration of the treatment of the complexlevel of notions and linguistic forms. This, in turn, opens up a deeper level ofthe narrator’s and narrative’s point of view.

Portelli’s model has been developed on the basis of a typical oral historyinterview (1997a: 4), which means that Portelli has defined oral history, espe-cially the basic sources in a way different to us. Portelli characterizes the oralhistory interview in the context of everyday life as exceptional: the tale in atypical oral history interview has never been told entirely before. Oral history(and life story), as a coherent narrative, does not occur in everyday life in its“natural status”, because it is a “synthetic product of social science”. To under-stand this through analysis one must navigate the area between textual ex-periment and frozen formulaic material and finally must not forget the rolethe historian plays in the interview. This is what makes oral history a “multivocaldiscourse”, which differs from other traditionally recognized genres (the fairytale or epic) by its original cultural position: oral history begins in the orality ofthe narrator but is directed towards (and concluded by) the written text of thehistorian (Portelli 1997a: 5).

However, a written autobiography and an official interrogation transcriptare in our opinion not so very different from documents created on the basis ofan oral history interview. Both sources are “initiated” in an oral situation, be ita situation of interrogation or the everyday autobiographic repertoire of a nar-



rator. In all three cases, we dealt with documents that, viewed from the aspectof oral history, have been created in order to speak about the past.

Naturally, the role of an oral history researcher is limited, or non-existentin creating the sources we use.6 The oral history interview is borne out of theco-operation of two “authors” including both the level of narration (the inter-viewee-narrator) and the analytical treatment of the theme (the interviewer-researcher). Ronald Grele (2007) has emphasized that an oral history inter-view as a verbal text has been created as a shared authorship. This, on the onehand, infers using the story-language of the narrative as well as the academiclanguage, but on the other as an interpretation of events by both the individu-als who experienced them and the theoretical aspect of the academic researcher(Grele 2007: 13–14). This also means that creating an oral history document ismore dynamic than creating the texts we discuss, as the researcher can in thecourse of an interview ask complementary questions and, if necessary, formu-late the text according to their interests. Furthermore, this dynamism makespossible a different method of interpretation, as a researcher who has partici-pated in creating the studied text can, as early as in the course of the inter-view, check the validity of his/her understanding. Researchers of texts thatalready exist do not have this possibility; indeed our material was createdwithout the researcher’s immediate participation as sovereign texts. Here theself-control of the researcher (their interpretation’s probable validity) is de-pendent on finding the story’s point of view,7 comparing it to other viewpointsand finding the contexts that cause any differences. Therefore researchingoral history hypothesizes comparing different viewpoints and creating a moregeneral historical and textological context, which in turn puts forward a com-plex use of sources of a different type (see also Jaago 2006).

While demonstrating the applicability of his model in greater detail Portellishows that in telling about critical or conflict situations the three analyzedlayers will come forward more clearly and powerfully:

In many oral history narratives, all modes converge not only on pivotalevents, but also on crucial themes. War, for instance, has such a totalimpact that it can be narrated in all modes: “Mussolini ruined the coun-try” (institutional); “Our town was destroyed” (communal); “I lost a son”(personal). (Portelli 1997b: 34)

Portelli took into consideration both the theoretical model and the narrationand saw conflict as the nodal point of narration where all three modes areconcentrated and support each other (in solving the conflict). Portelli callssuch nodal points or events ‘places of memory’ where all modes – institutional,communal, personal – come together, as if all meaning converge (Portelli 1997b:



33). The conflict and adaptation that occur during a long adversarial periodwas the issue of our hypothesis for which we found relevant sources: (1) Acourt file had been opened, in 1945, in a conflict situation (during the wave ofpolitical arrests after reinstating Soviet order in Estonia), and (2) in 2005, remi-niscences about that period of conflict were written in the form of an autobio-graphical narrative. The latter is retrospective, as by the time of writing theconflict had remained in the past, being real only in the after-effects. Theremaining aspect essential to our study was that layers in Portelli’s model ofhistory-telling should be clearly traceable and interwoven in those two sources.

In what follows we will describe both sources, demonstrating first howPortelli’s layers are represented in them and later how adaptation within theselayers can be linguistically observed. We shall not present the sources chrono-logically (a method of presentation we used in our first article which focusedon adaptation) but start with the source typologically most similar to classicoral history and Portelli’s theory – the autobiography. Then we shall analyzethe court files which do not include narratives; they become a source of oralhistory due to the researcher asking questions. The habitual view of suchdocuments is, within the context of political history, institutional.8

As a novel approach, we regard the material of the court file from the per-sonal perspective, which in the case of an autobiography is self-evident. Thecourt file has an interesting aspect in regard to Grele’s (2007: 13–14) “sharedauthority” argument in the concealment of the interpreter and the recorder.Differences in the two sources not only enabled us to explain the theme ofadaptation but also check whether our interpretations about adaptation differaccording to, or are independent of, genre specificity.

POST-SOVIET AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The main theme of the post-Soviet autobiographies of Estonians is the rela-tionship between the narrator and their relatives (or ethnic group) and theSoviet power. People describe how they interpret their relationship with theregime (as a rule, they are ignorant about the existence of court files). Autobio-graphies are retrospective, which means that descriptions of ‘the future’ areabout known events. That is the reason why the dialogical dynamics of thedifferent layers (personal, communal, and institutional) are syncretistic in au-tobiographies. They are expressed through images of memory where textsoriginating from different periods and systems all fit into a coherent system.We cannot reach conclusions about the adaptation process if we follow thesame chronological principle the author of the autobiography follows. Before



creating this definite autobiographical text, an opinion of official texts (no-tions) must exist. So we can handle the adaptation of the author of an autobio-graphy as a fact of linguistic and notional experience and make observationsabout the form the text displays.

We chose for analysis a text from the collection of Estonian Life Historiespreserved at the Estonian Cultural History Archives, in Tartu, Estonia, anautobiography written in 2005 by Urve Pärt born in 1939.9 First we analyzedthe autobiography supported by Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogic betweentexts and within text (Bakhtin 1987; see also its application in memory studiesin Wertsch 2002). This enabled us to view Urve Pärt’s autobiographical text asseveral different dialogically related texts and interwoven voice types whichsimultaneously, as in the case of an autobiography the interpretation is inretrospect, have been created from this dialogue. We examined the relation-ships between the different speakers and how Urve described her adaptationto the Soviet regime. Behind our analysis was the question of how the officialvoice of the Soviet regime becomes ‘a thinking device’ (Lotman 1994) on anautobiographical and communal level. We viewed Pärt’s adaptation as a fact ofnotional experience in which syncretistic narrative form manifests itself.

Our discussion about Urve Pärt’s text, and more generally about the multi-voiced character of an autobiographical text, coincided with Portelli’s narra-tive model of oral history. In the present article Pärt’s autobiographical textfits particularly well as the different voices here, in certain places, are evenpresented visually. The latter also points to the narrator’s conscious desire todifferentiate various voices in her narrative. In her written commentary tothe narrative Pärt accounts for her choice to include the opinions of others onthe basis that they have also helped to shape her life and understanding of theworld (Fig. 1 on p. 24). However, the layers that Pärt created in her text do notcompletely coincide with Portelli’s layers of analysis. Furthermore, from thepoint of view of our analysis, Soviet rhetoric comes to the foreground, theexistence of which, when compared to the ‘voices’ of her relatives and thevillage people, Pärt is not so conscious of.

The layers Pärt created in comparison to Portelli’s layers of analysis couldbe presented as follows:

1. The author’s voice tells of her and her family’s life on the basis of per-sonal or secondhand memories – the personal layer.

2. The author has recorded reminiscences and everyday philosophy fromlocal people whom she presents in her text as the common conscious-ness of the village people and as the ‘collective voice’ (of Estonians). Thefunction of this is to comment on the life of the author and her family,



Figure 1. A page from Pärt’s autobiography where opinions of her acquaintances and thestories she has heard are in a different handwriting style.



the (political, economical, and social) situation including what happenedin the official sphere – the communal layer.10

3. The voice of power and self-legitimizing of the occupation regimes isexpressed in the self-descriptive phraseology of the regimes and in thefragments of understanding the official history – institutional layer.

In our analysis of Pärt’s text, we concentrated only on the totalitarian voice ofthe 1940s and the 1950s.

The layered relationships of the personal and the communal to the officialcan be differentiated, on the basis of this autobiography, mainly according tothe ratio of conscious intentionality (or absence) and according to the amountof folklorization. Expressions of Soviet working life are most probably lessconsciously used. Indeed, a comparison of different autobiographies from thecollection of Estonian Life Histories demonstrates that the sphere of workacted as a channel between the official and the personal layers, and the usageof official phraseology occurs frequently in talking about working life. The wayin which the author forbids the autobiography to express any official points ofview, brings out the univocalism and authoritarianism of the institutional layer.This means that they do not comment, for example, on the status of either akulak11 or a bandit12, or any associated with Soviet society. These themes, andthe convictions related to them, are considered self-explanatory and belong tothe range of knowledge containing anti-Sovietism. Commenting on the insti-tutional layer would be inappropriate for the author would demonstrate doubtsas to the validity of their point of view. This self-understanding also forms apopular basis to the attitudes toward the personal files created by the Sovietpowers after the collapse of Communism and revealing the contents of theKGB files – a problem we shall discuss below.

In Pärt’s narrative, the reactions to the cult of Stalin as a supreme leader,to the ideological working culture propagated after the war, and to the radicalrestructuring of the habitual way of life are most strongly folklorized. Here,the opposition between the ‘own’ and the ‘alien’ is the strongest; the stressbeing laid on the conflict in the Soviet institutional level that is ‘alien’ and hasno referentiality.

In analyzing the official Soviet phraseology and notions in a personal narra-tive, two contradictory tendencies occurred. On the one hand there is clearopposition not only through irony and parody but also through forbidding anyrelation at all, which also excludes challenging one’s own convictions. On theother hand there is an inability to discuss the Soviet experience with non-Soviet phraseology (like in descriptions of tasks, the working environment,and conflicts in the workplace). The borderline between these tendencies need



not always be very clear, which also points at the complexity with adaptationin autobiographical reminiscences.

SOVIET PERSONAL FILE

Analysis of the Soviet personal file enabled us to investigate how the relation-ship between the institutional, communal and personal layers during the So-viet period changed the ‘point of view’. The autobiography presented the threelayers from the perspective of the narrating person, whereas the personal filedisplays a person from the institutional viewpoint. We analyzed one file con-taining documents relevant to an accusation against two men. This containedquestionnaires by the NKVD, interrogation protocols, correspondence betweeninstitutions and private individuals, etc. Both of the accused were EstonianRepublic officials in the same commune and were dismissed when the Sovietorder was put into force in Estonia in 1940; they were both employed againduring the German occupation and arrested in 1945 after the reinstatement ofthe Soviet power. They were court-martialled according to §58 of the SovietCriminal Code (applied in analogous cases in 39.7% instances13). One of themen died in his first prison year; another was able to return to Estonia afterstaying in Siberia for 12 years. We have collected information about both menfrom people who knew them. In the following discussion however, we use onlyinformation connected with the man who survived Friedrich Samuel (1906–1982), the former commune elder of Kohtla14.

From the perspective of the current research we were mainly interested inhow the dialogue between the institutional (official Soviet voice) and the per-sonal (the men accused in anti-Soviet activities) took place. As the court filereflects a chronological process, covering the period of 1945–1994, we werealso interested in the interactive adaptation of the participants in this dia-logue.

The core of the official Soviet layer is first of all noticeable in the question-naire describing the prisoners and also in the paragraph which convicted them.The contents of both are in direct conflict with how the accused interpret theirown activities. The questionnaire in 1945, for example, did not allow answersfrom the perspective of a citizen of the Estonian Republic, which both com-mune executives had been for more than 20 years. The adjudicator’s presuppo-sition that both defendants lived in the Soviet Union is very apparent in thequestionnaire and in the court’s decision. This means that they should havelived according to the rules of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republiceven when Estonia was an independent state. Questions about serving in the



army are a prime example, as the only possible choices for answers are: I servedin the Red Army or I fought against the Red Army.15 The prosecutors alsospeak of both collaboration with the occupation regime and treason. The word‘occupation’ was used without any attribution, as it only means the Germanoccupation (at the same time, from the Estonian perspective, there were twooccupations, the Soviet and Nazi occupation whereas both are described sym-metrically16). The core charge during the whole process is the betrayal of thehome country. This is the point which starts Friedrich Samuel’s interrogation.The accused denies betrayal. Even more so, when asked who else he couldname as a traitor, he answers that he knows nothing about treason and knowsnobody he could call a traitor. Such facts illustrate a serious conflict betweenthe interpretation of activities and social roles on the institutional and per-sonal level in 1945. The contents of the court’s decisions were generally notdisclosed to the people.17 This is confirmed by the fact that, having survivedimprisonment, Samuel applied for exoneration of the victims of Soviet repres-sions in 1963 and the widow of his colleague who died in the prison, also ap-plied for exoneration 25 years later. By the 1960s, the survivor of repressionshad achieved his purpose but only partially; the other man was exonerated,posthumously, at the end of the 1980s. The essence of the decision, from theaspect of the institution’s adaptation, is important for it says “due to the lack ofa proof of guilt” and that the man was only “an administrative official in theservice of the German occupation regime”. On the one hand, these documentsprove that the official institutional voice did not become authoritative from theaspect of the personal layer although it had to be taken into account; on theother hand, the institutional level had to readjust its position under the pres-sure of the communal and personal level.

In the following we shall discuss whether the institutional layer in the courtfile is only represented in the official viewpoint or if it also appears outside thatlevel. We shall return to the core accusation which is the betrayal of the homecountry as the men worked as commune administrators during the Germanoccupation period. Several questions consequently arise as to the tasks of thecommune administrators at the time. In these parts of the court file a conflictis apparent, and interconnects all three levels. Let us consider more closelythe questions and answers about the activities of the commune elder and hisdeputy, and how the relations between the commune administrators and thepeople of the commune look according to those documents. As a rule, the tasksof the commune administrators are described in connection with meeting thefood allotment norms or quota, etc. and supervising it during the Germanoccupation. For example, an interrogation starts with the question in which“repressions” of the village people who failed to meet the food quota (and other



such demands) did the commune elder participate in. The answer was, I re-minded the people about it when they had not met the norms. In the material ofthe investigation there is a testimony of someone living in the village that thecommune elder and his deputy strictly demanded that the people meet thefood norms imposed by the German occupation regime. The witness says thatthose who did not meet the norms were threatened with being denounced tothe authorities. The interrogator asks for the identities of anyone whom themen denounced. The witness cannot answer that question. In 1963, when theapplication for exoneration was handed in, the case was reopened to investi-gate once more the accusation that the commune elder repressed the localpeople in the matter of failing to meet the food norms of the German occupa-tion regime. No concrete proof, was found during the investigation, as not oneof the locals nor anyone of the members of their families had lodged a com-plaint18.

In the documents of the 1963 investigation the wartime commune appearsas a wellfunctioning social system and not a system of repression put intopractice by the parish administrators during the German occupation (an imagecreated by the institutional ‘voice’, as expressed in the questions of the inter-rogator19). For example, one of the witnesses cannot say that Samuel, beingthe commune elder, repressed these people from the village as a family mem-ber of someone who served in the Red Army during the war (the denial in theanswer hints at the way the interrogating official set the question). Anotherwitness says that he has heard nothing bad about the commune elder butknows, and names, those who Samuel helped in meeting the norms during theperiod. A third witness, a commune secretary of the period, claims that thecommune people had no complaints about their elder: his relations with thelocal people were good and he was thought of as a good man.

In this instance, the institutional present (the Soviet point of view) and thepast (the period of German occupation in retrospect) both demonstrate theconflict in the viewpoints of the two parties. The communal level appears inthe utterances of the witnesses which describe the relations of the communepeople and the administrators on the official level. The personal level showsitself in these parts of the testimony where personal qualities are mentionedin describing relations (he is spoken of as a good man) or the testimonies aremade more specific by mentioning personal experience (I have heard nothingbad about him; or when the witness explains how the commune elder suc-ceeded in decreasing quota for his father who had lost his wealth). The lattertendency to describe relations more exactly and positively becomes strongerin the material of 1963. This might have been caused by the novel way ofputting the questions (let us remind you that the start of a new investigation



was based on a claim that the accusation was invalid because no one had handedin a complaint. In addition, what happened in the 1960s was not considered adanger to anybody’s life as it was in 1945). Then again, both the accused andthe witnesses belonged to the same commune (both during the period of 1941–1944 and the 1945 and 1963 investigations), which within the context of nor-mal relations between people did not give cause for confrontation in activities,decision, or utterances.20

Relations between the communal level and the institutional level becomeevident in how the utterances of the witnesses are interpreted by the Sovietofficial: they describe people’s relations and attitudes while not noticing thatthey say things that the prosecutor can use either against the accused or thewitness. For example, a testimony of the accused man’s responsible work inthe office of a commune elder is interpreted by the investigator as active sup-port to the German occupation.

We may also place the argument of the accused against the accusations ofthe interrogator in 1945 in the communal level of the conflict of the interpre-tations of the local people and the Soviets. The interrogator claims that theaccused joined a band of Forest Brothers21 and therefore is a “bandit”. Theman answers that he was in the woods, hiding there like all the other villagepeople during the fierce battles. Communality here is involved in the war-timesurvival strategy of the village people which on the institutional level wasinterpreted as fighting against the Red Army. While the case was reinvestigatedin 1963, the accused is already skilled in avoiding the “traps” of the official,institutional position, saying that all the village people had hidden themselvesin the woods during the battles but were not armed. He now knows that, fromthe viewpoint of the Soviet regime, bandits were an armed group and evi-dently he did not know it before or think it necessary to consider it in anotherway. The officials believe his argument and drop the accusation.

The personal level not only appears in the descriptions of the document butalso in the researchers’ interpretation of the different reactions of the wit-nesses to the same, or analogous, questions. Earlier on we demonstrated howone man argued against the interrogator’s theory of a band of Forest Brothers.If we compare this to the answers of other witnesses, then according to thedescribed reaction the witnesses do not argue but also do not use the phrase aband of Forest Brothers in their answers. Such testimonies are interpreted bythe representatives of the authorities as an affirmation of belonging to theband of Forest Brothers. While reinvestigating the case in 1963, the same wit-nesses are asked how utterances about belonging to the band of Forest Broth-ers had got into the testimony which they now deny, even though they ac-knowledge their signature on the document. One of the witnesses explains



that he did not know Russian well and could not quite follow what was writtenin the protocol about belonging to the band of Forest Brothers. Another manwho knows Russian well enough asserts that they have put it down in a wrongway, adding, I know that Samuel hid in the woods but about his belonging tothe band I know nothing22. An interpretation of these statements is that thewitness interrogated first did not know Russian either but disputed the pros-ecutor’s theory from the very beginning. On the personal level both the adapt-ability of the men interrogated and the dangerous nature of the situation forthe witness versus the accused, or even the ability to perceive and bear dangercan be understood. There are also some quite natural qualities involved (amore argumentative or more acquiescent tone of dialogue as reflected in thedocuments).

Until now we have viewed the prosecutor as a representative of the institu-tional level and the accused, and the witnesses, as representatives of the com-munal and personal level. If we now shift the point of view, we must ask thequestion: in what way does the personality of the prosecutor make itself vis-ible in the documents?

Prosecutors as individuals change in the course of the process; the wit-nesses, however, remain the same. This enables us to follow the viewpoint ofthe accused and the witnesses during the whole process, but prevents us fromwatching the personal aspect of the prosecution. On most occasions only theinterrogator and the interrogated person met face-to-face. In 1945, the investi-gation was conducted by Aleksey Avgustovich Haruchi and in 1963 by Zhukovand Silkin. These are not Estonian names, which may show that these peoplehad come to Estonia with the Soviet regime. This is important when we lookat the prosecutor as an individual in a situation of conflict between images ofhistory (especially when considering the understanding of the notion of a homecountry). In the interrogation protocols of 1945, the interrogating official takesa noticeably more rigid position than in the protocols of 1963. In the earlyyears of the Soviet power an aggressive style is used while asking the ques-tions (during interrogations that mostly took place at night). Some examples:“When did you become a member of the band of ‘Forest Brothers’?” and anexpression that was always used – “the military and fascist organisation Oma-kaitse (Self Defence)”. In 1963, the questions are asked offering the interro-gated person a choice: “describe what you have been charged of”, “specify thecircumstances of your being in the woods”. As a rule, Omakaitse (Self Defence)is not called a military fascist organisation; simply “Omakaitse” or the neutralword “organisation” is used. The use of changes in language means that theinterrogator’s personality had nothing to do with it. The personality of theinterrogator does not become apparent in the file we examined; he embodies



in the document only a personified institution. When investigating sources ofthis type in a larger quantity, one of the questions would be whether such aresult here demonstrates that the official’s impersonality is an exception or arule.

Individuals, who have been held in prison and describe interrogation situa-tions in their narratives, categorize their interrogators as those who becamephysically violent and those who did not. In this file, beating the interrogatedperson or some other act of violence is not reflected. However the interro-gated man confirms that he was beaten: we can read in the first interrogationprotocol of 1963 that he explains his former admitting the charges with thefact that he was beaten twice under preliminary investigation. This is nottaken into consideration as he cannot prove his claim.23 The official role of theinterrogators is protected from the reader’s eyes in these documents: there isno possibility of perceiving either their human characteristics or their meth-ods of working. The document establishes the ‘voice’ of the Soviet regime as‘sterile’, regimented, and controlled.

CONCLUSION

The central point of our discussion was the question about adaptation as dia-lectic of change and consistency, and more specifically a question about thecomplementary usage of sources of a different type in investigating adaptabil-ity during a longer period.

We concentrated on the complementary nature of two different sources,namely a Soviet personal file and a post-Soviet written autobiography, fromthe perspective of investigating oral history. We demonstrated that in bothdocuments the institutional, communal, and personal layers are analyticallydifferentiable, making those sources complementary. At the same time, thepoints of view these sources reflect are contrary: in the court file everything isframed into the official-political point of view with which the individual has toadapt. In the autobiography the institutional and the communal level are de-scribed from the personal point of view. Both sources speak of the effect ofhistorical events on the lives of people and the different frames of the sourceshelp to understand the complexity of adaptation in revealing instances wherethe institutional and the personal remain in opposite positions, in which knowl-edge of the official enables one to express personal aims, and in which adapta-tion occurs unconditionally.

Comparison of two very different types of sources was made possible be-cause in both cases we put into the focus of the investigation the individual as



an active agent and regarded the relations of the power and the individualthrough this agent. Portelli’s model of the modes of history-telling, Bakhtin’sidea of multivocalism, and Lotman’s theory of semiosphere enabled us to viewboth texts in their inner and inter-relations, in their dialogue, and in theirchangeability. A complementary observation became possible due to the re-interpreting of possibilities of agency and dialogue in both sources. A change ofthe point of view was especially important when analyzing the court file forthis is a type of source which up to now has been used in a way that opposesour method. The focus of investigation is in these cases the historical period inwhich the researchers investigate the conditions that started shaping people’slives.

After investigating the personal files of the Latvians from the point of viewof the individual claims and referring to Bakhtin, Vieda Skultans concludedthat the KGB documents are monologues, since they involve “a denial of theequal rights of consciousness vis-à-vis truth” (Skultans 2001: 323). This is true,as we have demonstrated in the case of Friedrich Samuel’s personal file. Theinstitutional power has, in the file, and especially in the investigation tran-scripts, total control over the interpretation of the questions and the answers.Both the personal and the communal layer are reflected in those documentsthrough the institutional layer. Nevertheless, we also saw in the file a dia-logue between those layers from a diachronic perspective. Years later one ofthe parties took an opportunity to express his truth and found partial accept-ance in the other (which is apparent in the reopening of the investigation ofthe case and also on the corrected verdict), and this transformed the relationof the two parties into a dialogue. The fact that the monologic aspect of theKGB files was brought to the fore in Skultans’ treatment and the dialogicalaspect was demonstrated in our example may have occurred because the sourceswe investigated were slightly different. In the Latvian examples analyzed bySkultans, those who wrote the protocols of the interrogation “translated” theanswers of the interrogated persons more rigidly into official formulae than inour example. Additionally, the accused did not actively apply for reinvestigationlater and for that reason the diachronic viewing of those files is not possible.24

In our example Friedrich Samuel applied for reinvestigation into his casealmost twenty years after his conviction. During the whole process those whowrote the protocols probably did not check their language as rigidly as in theLatvian examples. We, therefore, have good reasons to speak about the agencyin both senses as emphasized by Skultans (2001: 321–322), although naturallynot in equal proportions. Samuel’s agency, the manner in which Samuel be-haved in the circumstances of his interrogation and his discontent at beingfound guilty, is expressed firstly as “being a subject of significance” and sec-



ondly, as someone who tries to get strategic power by establishing his ownmeaning. Documents in Samuel’s personal file (partly a result of his own agency)gave us an opportunity to view him as an active subject during the wholeprocess. This is different from those people who Skultans investigated as shecould only research agency in retrospect and ask questions about agency withinner moral self-regard. If we match Skultans’ claim with Portelli’s model ofhistory-telling then we can see that in the Latvian KGB files the convictedpersons’ agency does not, in contrast to our example, appear on the Sovietinstitutional level.

From the perspective of adaptability, dialogue and monologue in Urve Pärt’sautobiographical narrative are also meaningful. Although the purpose of thisarticle was to elucidate the complementary nature of the two sources, it didnot allow for investigation into these problems. We would still like to point outthat with the way the institutional voice is presented as monologue in theautobiography, expression of agency may manifest this on a communal andpersonal level. Therefore Pärt, for example, does not comment on Soviet ideo-logical and political categories such as ‘kulak’ and ‘bandit’, because the actualidentity of the personal and the communal layers is in the denial of them andneed not to be considered. At the same time, putting into uncritical use of theexpressions of Soviet working life may demonstrate the strong referentialityof those expressions which point at a dialogue.

Finally, what supra-genre knowledge might the post-Soviet autobiographyand the Soviet court file offer about social adaptability? Above all, both sourcesdemonstrate a conflict: institutional, communal, and personal layers do notagree but the dynamics still exist. In this sense the present analysis makes itpossible to view the conflict more profoundly. One of the outcomes of the closeanalysis was on the linguistic level: how far or how close the self-description isplaced, first grammatically (e.g., the ‘I’ participating in the action vs the unde-fined person or persons), secondly in using different notions (e.g., whether Iwas in the woods or was a member of the band of Forest Brothers), and thirdlyin creating imagery (e.g., irony, parody).

Our method of analysis made it possible to view the texts also from a supra-genre point of view. Taking into account the genre specificity, it was still possi-ble to compare texts of different character that were created in a different wayon the personal, communal, and institutional level. As a result it appearedthat, in the documents created by the Soviet powers, the agency of the re-pressed person is reflected even when control over the situation seems to beexclusively in the hands of the Soviet officials. This is an important result fromthe aspect of oral history. Sources created institutionally reflect processes,including the development of the Soviet Union, and its disintegration as a



result of the actions of those in power. The political changes accompanying it,and people with their everyday practices, attitudes, or opinions, do not comeinto focus. Conversely, the autobiography demonstrated the presence and ex-istence of the institutional language in the personal point of view which usu-ally tends to remain in the background.

COMMENTS

1 The conference was organized by the Institute of History at the Jagiellonian Univer-sity in Cracow, 8–10 November 2007 under the title “Oral History: The Art of Dia-logue”.

2 The Cracow report formed the basis of our article “(Re)constructing conflict and dia-logue: oral history as a creative process”, which will be published in the collection ofconference materials. Funding for the research for both the present and the above-mentioned article came from the project “Aspects of Terminology and Source Criti-cism in the Study of Everyday Culture” under the state program “Estonian Lan-guage and National Memory” and the ESF grant No. 6687. We are grateful to KerstiUnt for translating the article from Estonian to English and to Marcus Denton forexhaustive language editing.

3 We divided the analytical work of both the Cracow and this report in the same way.Tiiu Jaago concentrated on the court files from the aspect of adaptation while EneKõresaar focused on the written autobiographies. We then worked together on thefinal analysis and conclusions.

4 We are especially grateful to Anne Heimo from the University of Turku who sug-gested Portelli’s model for analysing our material. We are also grateful to OlafMertelsmann, a historian at the University of Tartu for his profound commentswhich helped us to explain the differences between the viewpoint of oral history andhistory and which made us go even deeper into putting into words the methodologicalaspects of oral history as a mode of research. We used Portelli’s model at the 7thESSCH Conference in Lisbon in February 2008 in the paper “The “truth of continu-ity” in Estonian oral history: negotiating the meaning of the 20th century”. We shouldalso like to express our gratitude to all participants of the Oral History session, whoshared their thoughts and gave us feedback. The present article is a developed ver-sion of the Lisbon paper.

5 Elina Makkonen (2006) has applied the same model in an interpretation of howpeople connected with the University of Joensuu, Finland described it as an institu-tion, work and study environment as well as a personal period of life. More indirectly,others, like Pauliina Latvala (2005), used the model in her study of relationshipsbetween (family) history-telling and historiography in the late 1990s in Finland.Makkonen and Latvala selected for their analysis coherent sources. Our texts areincoherent, furthermore, our material tells of a painful and long-term conflict.

6 The public appeal which was our primary method of collecting written life storiesenables the researcher to indirectly guide the writer generally towards certain themes



(cf. about thematic appeals or calls for autobiographic writing in Kõresaar 2005: 17–27), although the author’s motivation and choice are still pre-eminent.

7 A researcher of autobiographies has different opportunities compared to a researcherof archive documents. If the autobiography has been written in the near past, as inour case, the author can be found and feedback obtained about the researcher’sinterpretation and understanding of the text. While working with Urve Pärt’s auto-biography, we contacted her both by phone and correspondence.

8 See, e.g., Jürjo 1996; Crimes of the Soviet Occupation 2007; Mandel 2007.

9 EKLA f. 350: 1809 Estonian Cultural History Archives, Urve Pärt’s autobiography.

10 Here the complexity of the communal layer in autobiography is demonstrated: ‘com-munal’ can at the same time be a village, working place, neighbourhood as well asthe ethnic community if it is from the aspect of historical consciousness separatedfrom the official, institutional level, a situation which characterizes the autobio-graphical reminiscences of Estonians of the the Soviet period.

11 The Soviet term ‘kulak’ denoted wealthier peasants who were persecuted & deportedin the process of collectivisation. In the Estonian context, the term was introducesduring the annexation of the country in 1940.

12 Bandits – the post-war Soviet term for people vehemently opposed to the Sovietpower, also applied to Forest Brothers.

13 See Political Arrests in Estonia 1996: 477.

14 A municipality in Northeast Estonia.

15 Cf. in the questionnaire p. 17 (service in Red Army) and p. 18 (service in counter-revolutionary armies).

16 Estonia was occupied both by the Soviet Union in 1940–1941 and Nazi Germany in1941–1944. Estonians perceived both powers as alien. Furthermore, as battles alsotook place on the Estonian territory, these occupations are often described in autobi-ographies in comparison and together.

17 We have already pointed at the incomprehensibility of the accusation for the accused.See also Vieda Skultans’ (2001) discussion of how with the opening up of the KGBarchives individuals enter into a retrospective dialogue with court files assembledabout them.

18 ERAF.130SM-1-12640, p. 86.

19 Cf. the discussion about how the individual’s answers dissolve in the totalitarianlanguage of the institution of the KGB files in Skultans 2001: 325ff.

20 A change of relations within a community during the early years of the Soviet regimeis one of the most serious themes: there are many stereotypical opinions (such as, noone was sent to the Siberia from our village for we had no envious people; no complaint,no judgement, etc); formulated experience (one had to be afraid of nasty people whotalked too much; a wise village family never poked its nose into the private life of others);stories of how people saved one another or vice versa. To this theme, Estonian histo-



rian Mati Mandel has dedicated research based on the Soviet interrogation tran-scripts. In the closing statement of his book he also explains his point of departure,[t]hose files reflect the smallness of people who are avaricious, vengeful, and traitorous.[---] The main idea of this book is to make us think about why it happened that anindividual from Western Estonia acted in such evil manner against another and how toavoid everything that happened in 1940–1941 in the future. (Mandel 2007: 11)

21 Forest Brothers or Estonian ‘metsavennad’, were partisans who sought refuge in thewoods and waged guerilla war against the Soviet rule during and after the SecondWorld War.

22 Cf. ERAF. 130SM-1-12640, pp. 48, 92–97, 102–103.

23 The source under discussion does not give direct evidence of the use of physicalviolence (there is only the witness’ claim). If however, we take into account othersources and read the protocols of 1945, we might conclude these ‘moments’ from twocircumstances. The first is that the length of the protocol and the time of interroga-tion are contradictory. The third interrogation lasted for two hours and twenty min-utes, but the protocol fills only one and a half pages, which is considerably shorterthan the other protocols. The second is the medical certificate that states that be-cause of the poor health of the accused, he should do easier work. The certificate isplaced in the file between the sixth and the last protocol and the final conviction (theplacement being both as a document of the file and in the sense of the temporaloccurrence of events).

24 Skultans’ aim is not to analyse the files but the reactions of the individuals whenthey read their files for the first time after the opening of the archives. Skultanscould read those documents only with the help of a translator. So her analysis con-centrated on the moments when her respondents argue the totality of the language ofthe documents and reclaim their identity as agents retrospectively in the post-So-viet period. Thus the cases analyzed by Skultans have some confluence with thepost-Soviet autobiographical remembering which in our research is represented byUrve Pärt’s autobiography.

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